


Recast

by cleodoxa



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: HP: Epilogue Compliant, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-06-16
Updated: 2012-06-16
Packaged: 2017-11-07 20:31:54
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 18,381
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/435140
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cleodoxa/pseuds/cleodoxa
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Draco works in the Pensieve Archive and is beginning to get over his divorce. His life is disturbed when a serial killer strikes the Wizarding world and seems to have a particular interest in Draco. Somehow it all stirs up his Potter issues.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Recast

Draco had his eyes shut when the cavalry arrived. He heard them, though, and the routine phrases that meant arrest. They’d live, happy ending, the allegorical basilisk had been slain. First, he kept his eyes shut as he gave himself up to the relief crashing though him, making his knees weaker than the fear had. Then the bitterness seeped in. Too late now. No heroics from Draco, no tapping of that resource he had spurts of belief in, no mastering the situation with the strength of his will or magic.

“Malfoy? Malfoy?” asked Potter. Draco didn’t open his eyes until Potter stumbled over a bone on the floor, which cracked beneath his foot.

“I know, it’s all over,” Draco snapped.

“Neither of you two too traumatised?” Weasley called. “Let’s get back to the Ministry and get this whole business over with so we can _celebrate_.”

Even as he spoke, Aurors were drifting out of the innermost Chamber of Secrets, among them the Aurors gripping the murderer, now bound, by the arms.

“You okay, Malfoy?” asked Potter. He looked for some reason more luminous and large than usual. Draco managed to stop staring blankly and tried to look alert and businesslike. When Potter turned his back Draco narrowed his eyes at it.

_I’ll get you for this,_ he thought. “This” being the act of being Potter, which he was almost enjoying finding suddenly unreasonably incendiary. _Once and for all, I’ll get you._ And so the curtain fell on what would be considered the scene of Harry Potter’s greatest triumph since the death of Voldemort. It would rise again on _Draco’s Revenge_ , Draco told himself, and to be fair, melodrama had been the keynote of the day.

*

Daphne’s death was the beginning of it for Draco, purely a family affair, though she wasn’t even his family anymore, their own personal awfulness, nothing to do with the Boy Who Lived. Except _apparently_ , as it turned out, he’d been tangled in it before he was born. Sitting opposite Astoria with her white face telling him about it, having just stepped out of the Floo, brought home to him how much Astoria was undeniably family, even though their marriage had ended. An only child himself, when he’d wanted to take Astoria and everything belonging to her _inside_ him in some way, some expansion had been required for a sibling relationship. The way Astoria was still quick to resent Daphne as the older sister who got to things first and devoured opportunities, leaving none for Astoria, though they’d only been a year apart. Astoria had determinedly involved herself with what Daphne did at Hogwarts, so as to make sure she wasn’t missing anything. She’d given Theo Nott money to make him, for once in his life, do something as gregarious as take her to the Yule Ball (dancing was included in the price) so she could be there like Daphne. When he’d first started seeing Astoria, Draco had had a vague idea they didn’t get on that well, but, feeling free to say something vaguely critical about Daphne, had been smacked down smartly. Astoria was one of those “I can say it but not you” defenders, not least because Daphne tenderly ignored all Astoria’s jostling and grievances: Astoria was her little sister. Which was of course again annoying. They sought success for each other, Daphne overtly, Astoria covertly, and while Astoria might indulge in traditional smearing of any too shiny surfaces in her sister’s life, she emphatically rejected and tried to chase away any real misfortune or failure.

Astoria had not been there to chase away this. “I keep wanting to talk to her about it, find her and make her be okay after being abducted and violently murdered. But _she’s not there_.” 

Draco felt empty of things to give back to this absence. He thought about saying that, even if it wasn’t true, she must believe the damage to the body occurred after _Avada Kevadra_. But that, like almost anything, seemed a wrong disruption. For a moment, he thought they were married still, and tried to project the impact on their relationship, because this kind of thing didn’t go away in a hurry, leaving everything where it was. Then he remembered they’d been divorced two years, and she’d only come to him because she needed to tell someone who didn’t know, like a disease itching at her until she passed it on. And now neither of them knew what to do with it.

Though of course they had to have a funeral. Scorpius came home from Hogwarts the day before it, shocked, quiet and worried about his mother. It was in the newspapers with all the gory details, and Scorpius hadn’t had the experience of being in the same place as the news before. Draco had wanted him never to have it; he’d wanted to move on from all that messiness in his youth to the success of family life, where everything was quietly functional and Scorpius would be set on the middle of a path he couldn’t fall off of and have to try and scramble onto another. The divorce had not been what he’d had in mind, but that hadn’t made the path buck beneath them in such a _suddenly_ jarring way.

It was hard to remember at the funeral that the people there were nothing to do with him anymore; Astoria and Daphne’s parents and Daphne’s husband, that after this he didn’t know when he’d ever have another meal with them, keeping up with their progress in “getting over it.” Daphne’s husband Robert was perhaps the nicest man Draco had ever met, and Astoria had always made a joke of pretending he was loathsome to her in various ridiculously trivial aspects, to avoid simple hearty congratulations on Daphne’s find. He didn’t seem to be doing well. It didn’t take long for Astoria to feel it impossible for him to go back to his and Daphne’s empty house and tell him he should come back with her after everyone had gone.

Draco would probably have left when most of the other attendants did, but it didn’t seem right to leave Scorpius there. He remained at the Greengrass’s house until evening, when Scorpius’s portkey back to Hogwarts activated. It didn’t seem right to send him off for weeks on such a dismal note, but then there didn’t seem much he could do about it.

*

It was less than two weeks after Daphne died when it happened again. Not to anyone in Draco’s orbit, which he could not give enough thanks for. A wizard this time, someone he’d never heard of before his dying made the news because, apart from anything else, the Muggles found the body on the steps to his home first, and extensive Obliviation was required so that Joe Aveling did not make the Muggle news as well. Daphne Greengrass-Lyte was no longer so lonely, so exceptionally unfortunate; her name had Joe Aveling for company. From disgustedly begrudging every mention made in the Daily Prophet of Daphne’s murder, Astoria went to eagerly following the coverage on Joe Aveling. Draco wasn’t sure what she was getting out of it, though, as he pointed out, surely the more crimes committed, the more likely that the perpetrator would be caught.

“Yes. Though there’s no Dementors,” said Astoria. 

*

“So you’ve seen her?” asked Theo later. Draco often had lunch with him in Diagon Alley – Theo had a bookshop in Knockturn Alley.

“Yes, a couple of times. I think she has to keep getting breathers from Robert,” said Draco.

“You know, this is the kind of time when people break up if they’re together and get together if they’re not,” said Theo.

“Oh no. This isn’t the kind of time people get together in. And anyway...” Draco wasn’t sure he wanted to go into emotions with Theo.

“Mmm?”

“You can’t go back.”

“I suppose I shouldn’t remind you, but you used to go on about how if you had a Timeturner you’d go over your marriage however many times it took to get it right,” said Theo. The glint of curiosity in his eyes was unusual; a large part of the reason Draco confided in Theo from time to time was the way his nonchalant impassive manner seemed to absorb without trace anything he disgorged.

Draco instinctively flinched from his own words repeated back to him. The prospect of fanatically tracing the precise cause of his marriage’s failure seemed incredibly depressing now, the idea seeming to come from a painfully uncomfortable place that lay behind him, as if through a series of interlocking chambers that had grown progressively larger. He felt slightly chilled and cheered at the same time. “I think I’ve got over it. How healthy,” Draco said.

*

Draco was, in his capacity as a responsible Pensieve Archivist (Head Pensieve Archivist in the Pensieve Archive section consisting of himself and Grace), Ministry worker, and, indeed, member of the wizarding public, was bound to notice and report information that seemed important. It was doubtful he’d have experienced the same alacrity and heartfelt hope in doing so if Daphne and her family had been names in the paper to him, however. The two largest categories of memories in his custody were evidence for trials, and historical records. The Ministry had accumulated a fair amount of memories in the latter without even trying, but in the last couple of decades they had made a conscious effort to “capitalise on the most precious resource, the living memory of wizards and witches.” Draco himself, in his younger, unpromoted days, had gone round nursing homes for the wizarding elderly and the premises of various little societies for outdated interests, gathering memories of archaic robe designs, charms that had fallen out of fashion, the very last Anglo-Saxon Scorcher dragon, the pitifully unstandardised brooms in the days of artisans rather than brands, which the old people always assured him had idiosyncratic brilliance never achieved by those things churned out by _geminio_ , old history... Draco had learnt a lot in his job, much of which he hadn’t at all appreciated at the time, but he now realised added much dimension to what he saw about him in the modern Wizarding world. He’d also realised, somewhat earlier, that if this was Wizarding culture, it wasn’t really what his parents had tried to instil in him. This, of course, was the message the Ministry was trying to convey at the same time as offering a sop to the more conventional or prejudiced sectors of Wizarding society: no bloodshed needed to preserve the true spirit of the Wizarding world!

Draco was dealing with a clutch of bottled memories to do with Seers. Divination was beginning to become a little more reputable, after decades out in the cold, and the Head of the Archive had suggested they acquire some memories of the Seers who were esteemed the last time the subject was fashionable. Draco preferred to write the catalogue entries himself, accuracy being essential, and it was necessary to not only sit through the memory several times but _observe_. Also, often people who needed to check facts for professional or academic purposes did not bother or were not permitted to view the memory itself, so his summing-up, inevitably tainted a little by personality, was what counted. These Seers, Draco was prepared to admit, were a _tad_ less irritating than Professor Trelawney, but the clasped hands and the self-consciously portentous manner that sandwiched even the prophecies that later turned out to be onto something were familiar. Perhaps the fact most people would find it silly was part of the point, a screening process, Draco thought, screwing himself up to generosity. Watching memories had the potential to be as irritating as a disappointing Quidditch match, so many opportunities irrevocably not taken and mistakes made. Draco had ended up developing his empathy skills to compensate.

This was the memory of Julietta Braidwood’s daughter. Madam Braidwood was remonstrating with her daughter for sliding up the banisters when a change came over her. Draco, standing at the foot of the stairs, saw the little girl gaze at her in consternation but not panic. The sudden absence behind her mother’s face was probably something she’d seen before but wasn’t exactly used to. There was a sustained period of sharp, quick breaths and closed eyes darting in their sockets. Draco leaned on the banister post and waited for her to get on with it.

“There will be a man who is still called a boy. He is special and not special. There is someone who leaves bodies behind him. The man will follow the bodies and succeed in ending the carnage, because he is himself.”

Draco was now standing upright, head turned sharply towards Madam Braidwood. No more followed. The little girl said “Mama? Mama?” and tentatively waved a hand in front of her mother’s face. Draco was back in the Pensieve Archive.

He’d come across his grandfather once unexpectedly in someone else’s memory. There had been the same shock of personal relevance where he sought none, but this was intensified by the sense of expediency. He sent off a memo to Potter at once, and wandered around waiting, too keyed up to return to work.

“Something up?” asked Grace, looking up from labelling pensieves.

“You’ll see in a minute.”

Potter came down accompanied by Weasley and Auror Ribner. They’d obviously hurried down and were breathless and eager.

“Something about the Greengrass and Aveling cases?” Potter prompted.

Draco gestured to the pensieve on his desk. “The Greengrass and Aveling cases?” Grace repeated while the three Aurors experienced the memory.

“ _Wait_ ,” said Draco. He wasn’t sure the Aurors looked excited enough.

“Well, it does sound like she’s talking about Harry,” Weasley said.

“As the Head Auror, it’s obviously my responsibility. It’s not a personal mission,” said Potter, sounding as though he was instinctively rejecting something. “Although obviously it’s good to think we’ll succeed,” he added promptly. There was the usual sense of underlying stiff effort from Potter and Weasley to maintain professional politeness, with an extra muffling from the awareness Draco was the ex-brother-in-law of one of the victims.

“Not so good to think we’ve hardly begun the trail of bodies,” said Auror Ribner.

“It’s a shame she wasn’t clearer about what I’m supposed to do about it,” Potter said, looking more anxious and awkward.

“I’d just do your job as normal and not worry about it if I was you, Auror Potter,” Grace chipped in.

“Yeah, really it’s just a prophecy that you’re going to be where you are now while this case is happening. So basically you’ve already done it,” said Weasley. Like Grace, Weasley was obviously concerned that Potter’s sensitive soul should not be burdened by another prophecy, another mission.

“Mind you pay attention to your job, then, Potter,” said Draco, something he doubted he’d have got away with in normal circumstances.

When the Aurors had gone, that funny grinding sensation of wanting to force some admission from them left him, replaced by a calmer feeling of things in their right place. Surely Astoria would like to hear that her sister’s killer would be caught, and once they were, Daphne’s death wouldn’t feel part of an ongoing story. Draco felt a guilty pang at being so eager to put her away. She’d been good during the breakup of his and Astoria’s marriage; Draco knew she’d represented him to Astoria in the same kind deciphering light in which she represented Astoria to him.

*

I wish I could do it,” said Astoria later. Draco had hesitated but felt he _ought_ to Floo Astoria and Robert. “I wish I could see whatever leads and clues and theories the Aurors have. I have this idea the right ones would just loom out at me. I kind of wish the prophecy had been about me.”

“I guess the universe just loves giving Potter all the jobs. Otherwise, he wouldn’t be _special_ ,” Draco said.

He and Astoria’s gaze slipped glumly to Robert. Somehow, he looked as if he was trying to find a way to make the prophecy suggest the murder victims would be resurrected.

*

The next day Draco had to attend the Archive Department meeting. He had to sit through a lot of boring stuff about the other Archive sections before getting to hear the praise due to him as “a very _innovative_ Pensieve Archivist.” Then he heard that his reward was to be a third member of staff in the Pensieve Archive, something he’d been asking about for ages.

“They managed to find the funding, then?” asked Draco. “Is the post going to be advertised or--?”

“No, there’s someone already lined up. I may as well tell you they’re a nephew of the Department Head of International Magical Cooperation. Ryan Cobbing, starting on Monday.”

Draco sighed but said nothing. A _troublesome_ nephew, no doubt, and it wasn’t as if he’d be given any right to complain, as an ex-Death Eater who’d been given his own start in the Pensive Archive.

*

Ryan Cobbing was alright at first glance. As yet, he was in the “wouldn’t mind a no doubt ill-advised fuck with if the stars align and he swings that way” category of alright. He came in with an apologetic air that didn’t suit him, like a tall man ducking down under a low ceiling. He soon dropped it and was sitting on Grace’s desk asking lots of questions.

“Do you have memories of celebrities?” Ryan asked.

“Some, yeah. We don’t really care about them, but people send us them sometimes. Just bursting to share the time they served one of the Greymalkins or Harry Potter. If they don’t write and offer to sell for a very reasonable price, that is,” said Draco.

“So you take any memories that get submitted, then?” asked Ryan.

“Mostly,” said Grace. His puppyish enthusiasm was beginning to irk both Draco and Grace – particularly Grace, as Ryan was sitting on her desk and had taken her quill to fiddle with. He twirled it between his fingers in a peculiarly flirtatious way in between shooting glances at her, Her eyes were fixed on it, leaning away as if expecting him to chuck her under the chin with it.

“We do get some that are completely useless,” said Draco, who after all had to make sure Ryan knew what he was doing. “We’re squeamish about chucking them altogether, though; we put them in that corner and go through them every couple of years. We end up keeping too many of them, actually. On the one hand, we haven’t got infinite space; on the other, it’s easy to get sentimental about saving a particular sunset for posterity or whatever. Now that you’ve put it into my mind, that can be a first day task for you.” Draco didn’t mention that, with a dwindling but still present regularity, memories of him as a Death Eater would turn up amongst unsolicited submissions. These did not get put into the corner with memories of sunsets and anonymous people fucking and crup fights; Draco of course treated them like any other historically relevant memory. He and Grace never referred to them.

Ryan got on with the job without asking too many annoying questions and Draco could admire the sandy-gold hair at the back of his neck in idle moments.

*

A few days later, Draco came home from work to find a rather large flat rectangular parcel had been dropped by owls inside a window. He hadn’t ordered anything and there was no return address. On opening, it proved to be a picture, the glass covering it in shards, no doubt as a result of being dropped on the floor from a height by owls. Draco mended it and looked at the picture. It was a vista of rooftops on which rain was falling. The rooftops looked like ordinary London rooftops, but the light picked subtle shades of mauve, green and blue out of the shining slates. The raindrops trickled and dripped hypnotically and the picture had a calm gleam; Draco found it oddly appealing. _Except, it was a mysterious picture from an unknown source, very likely designed to have some sinister effect on him._ Dammit, this was not wanted to deal with when he came home. He was tempted to run some tests on it himself but he didn’t think his awakened paranoia could be quietened even he found nothing wrong with the picture; there might be something lurking about it unfound, or, worse, he could be already compromised, unfit to discern anything amiss. Some form of Imperius designed to have him commit a crime with no input of his own will could well be someone’s idea of revenge served cold. Or someone could simply be planting a Dark Object on him. Better by far to go back to the Ministry and take the picture in to the Aurors for inspection. The idea of Aurors in general still made Draco twitchy, but it was much better to be demonstrably innocent.

He tucked the picture under his arm and Floo’d back to the Ministry. Preparing himself in the lift to be a dutiful member of the wizarding community reporting anything at all suspicious, he latched onto Potter coming out of the loo by the lift.

“Oh, Potter, I’m just coming to see you – well, the Auror Department. I’ve just found this picture had been delivered to my house, and I’m a bit concerned because I didn’t buy it or anything, and there’s no clue as to the sender. And then I wondered if I was finding it too alluring for rainy rooftops.”

Harry’s head jerked up at that. “Alluring?” he asked, as if the idea of someone fancying rooftops was going through his mind and setting off alarm bells.

“Attention-getting,” Draco snapped. “It’s difficult to phrase.”

“Well, I can see why you’d be concerned to receive something with no explanation,” said Potter. He took Draco through to the Auror Department and motioned Draco to sit at his desk. “I’ll try some things; I should be able to tell one way or the other.” He took the picture into an inner office. Draco wondered if there were special instruments for detecting suspicious spells in there, or if Potter didn’t want to let Draco see what tests he used.

Draco had been encountering Potter, Weasley and Granger too from Law Enforcement for years as they came down to fetch and hand in memories for their cases, since he’d first started. They’d found it hard to deal with him normally; Weasley obviously didn’t trust himself and ignored him in favour of his colleagues even when inconvenient. This was no longer possible when Draco’s superior retired, and in any case Weasley’s ire had faded somewhat. Draco had found it hard to deal with Potter, particularly. The knowledge that they were no longer two boys at the same school and therefore in many ways on equal playing ground, that Draco was mired in infamy he could never shake off while Potter was proved once and for all a hero, destined for great things, _rankled_. He clenched up with burning resentment when Potter was in the same room. He had to get over it a bit when he and Potter had to speak to each other, because of the need to unclench his teeth, and because glaring at Harry Potter with narrowed eyes, too choked with resentment to hear what was said to him, was not the way to make friends and influence people.

Potter came back with the picture. “It’s a perfectly normal picture. Well, magical picture, anyway.”

“You can promise that?” asked Draco.

“I can promise you that the latest magical analysis and Dark detection methods find it to be harmless. It’s _extremely_ unlikely that there’s something there I didn’t pick up on, but it’s your call. It’s still something you were sent mysteriously, but perhaps you’ll get some kind of explanation.”

Draco considered. “Now that I look at it again it looks a little familiar. I’m not sure...”

“It _is_ a little familiar,” Potter pointed out. “Not that rainy rooftops are going to be unfamiliar in any case. And raindrops can be a bit hypnotic, if you’re still finding it alluring. I have to get on now so if you’d just take your picture...?”

He went off into another office before Draco could say anything.

Draco took his picture and left quickly before anyone could take too much notice of him. Home again, he left the picture on the kitchen table, where he sat down to write a TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN letter. If he died, or was otherwise involved in something strange or bad, the mysterious picture he’d received was at the bottom of it, and more particularly, Harry Potter’s incompetence as an Auror.

*

The Pensieve Archive had been given a memory containing Muggle state secrets. It was mostly a memory of two wizards having an important conversation that lead to one of them writing a very important book a decade ago, but the wizards in question were infiltrating the Muggle equivalent of the Department of Mysteries at the time, and people were talking Important Secret Business in the background. Draco sourly wondered if they’d ever got the stinging whack on the wrist they deserved for their total unconcern for things like the Statute of Secrecy and maintaining their cover, or if genius carried all before it.

The important thing was that Draco needed to register the Ministry’s possession of this memory at the Muggle Liaison Office. The Ministry did not liaise with Muggles often enough that they needed more than one person to help them do it, but at least that person was a Muggle, not even a Squib. Draco wondered when this kind of thing came up whether Eric Teanby had authority invested in him by Muggles to hand out permission in this way, or if it was just a gesture on the Ministry’s part.

When Draco Floo’d in to the Muggle Liaison Office, he noticed with irritation that Eric was not at his desk. The two adjacent rooms in which Eric was sometimes ensconced were empty, as Draco could see through the wide open doors, so he wasn’t off doing his job. The kitchen was absent of Eric making coffee. It wasn’t lunchtime. Finally Draco noticed that the door leading to the fire escape, leading down to the ground or up to the roof, was open. It was held open by a stack of leaflets. Now Draco was looking, the shelves usually holding leaflets on the subjects the Office dealt with most frequently – Muggle families struggling to understand their magical relatives, how to break the news to your Muggle lover, so you think you want to work with Muggles – were looking ransacked. Draco stood by the door and looked at the paper trail. He had a bad feeling.

It would perhaps have been more like Draco really to turn tail back to the Ministry, but morbid curiosity seemed enough to push him slowly up the stairs. He noticed first that Harry Potter was standing on the roof, with a rush of relief connected, in a precognitive kind of way, to the body Potter was standing by, which he noticed second. It had Eric’s build and hair colour. The rooftop was quite liberally daubed with blood, though it was already hard to see under the gleam of rain reflecting a dull white sky. There was a pool under Eric, which the rain was making larger. Draco, his mind wincing away, tried to imagine Eric’s pain and fear being diluted and washed away like the evidence. The third thing he noticed was that the roofscape around him was not just like, but a lot like, the picture someone had sent him.

“ _Petrificus totalis!_ ” said Potter, a rude interruption of Draco’s gratitude for his presence. He strode up to Draco and searched him, quickly finding his wand but persisting nonetheless in feeling him up. His handkerchief was knocked out and fluttered into a streak of blood and water.

“ _Priori incantatum!_ Potter retrieved nothing more exciting than Draco’s breakfast preparations and clothes summoning of the morning. He released Draco into full possession of his body again. “What are you doing here?” he demanded.

“I came to register a memory. Grace and Ryan will tell you,” said Draco, his voice thin. One of his worst nightmares seemed to teeter on the brink of coming true.

Potter gave him a hard look. “Alright. I guess you’ve noticed that this looks like your picture. I suppose I should have given it more thought.”

“If it means something in relation to _this_ , rather than being a plot in itself, I still don’t see _what_ it means,” said Draco.

“I’ll admit I don’t either,” said Potter.

“How can it be a _clue_ , it’s a rooftop, how fucking specific are rooftops? Even if you Aurors all went: the next murder will take place on a rooftop – where’s that going to get you? What if it means: you’ll be next? Do you think it could mean that?”

Potter put his hands in his pockets and sighed. “It’s not a very _clear_ way of saying that, anyway. We have to assume the picture says something in serial killer language, which is thankfully quite obscure to the rest of us. Caution won’t be misplaced, Malfoy, that’s all we can say right now.”

Draco didn’t find this soothing. He remembered the prophecy and tried to find that soothing.

“You’d better go back to work. I’ve got a long day ahead of me,” Draco heard him say once he was already heading down the stairs.

It was surprisingly awkward to tell Grace and Ryan. Draco did think about not doing so as he made his way down to the archive, but he didn’t think he could get on with work as if nothing had happened. The awareness of something so dramatic, so disruptive to desultory work small talk, made him hesitate between cheesy theatrics that seemed gossipy and unfeeling, and affected “oh by the way, another one bites the dust” nonchalance.

“Eric’s dead,” he said.

“ _Really_?” said Grace.

“Just now, I mean. There’s been another murder.”

“You didn’t _see_ it?” said Grace.

“Eric?” said Ryan.

“The name of the guy at the Muggle Liaison Office. No, I found him on the roof. Harry Potter was there.”

“You mean it was already a crime scene? They should have told people; it’s obvious people are going to be going there,” said Ryan.

“He’d only just got there; he got all jumpy when I turned up. I’m probably lucky it wasn’t Weasley, I bet he’d have been even more eager to believe I’m a mad serial killer.”

“Why, did Potter think about arresting you? Surprised he didn’t, actually. Being in the wrong place at the wrong time is a terrible thing; it’s like when they’re in the arresting frame of mind they can’t help but arrest anyone they see,” Ryan said, with a well-worn dark earnestness.

“Hmm,” said Draco, reminded of Ryan’s troublesome past.

“Was it really horrible?” asked Grace.

“I managed not to look much,” said Draco. “But it didn’t make me very happy, no.”

“Do you think you should go home?” asked Grace.

“Nah, sitting at home’s not going to make me feel better. Maybe I can find some more cheerful memories to work on,” said Draco. Maybe sitting at home would make some people feel better, he didn’t know. Even when he did go home, he didn’t find anyone and tell them. It wasn’t like he didn’t have friends to show sympathy and share his fears but somehow it didn’t seem like enough. They couldn’t really make anything better. It was all his, in the end. There wasn’t someone who was to do with him, someone he felt _with_. He wanted someone whose presence absorbed everything, making it neutral or special. He wanted to be in love again. This was a channel he’d half-consciously eased himself into, sliding into a familiar melancholy self-pity to give himself something else to worry about.

He considered going out, seeing if he could pick someone up, but in his present mood he felt such a transparent attempt at self-manipulation would fall flat. He might end up staring at the ceiling afterwards, beginning a speech on whether there was a meaning to life. (It had happened before.) This was not to say that, now he thought about it, rediscovering the simple pleasures in life would not be invigorating. Draco resolved to stretch his bisexual wings, have a man and a woman.

When he felt less moody, he did, and was cheered. Not least, he realised the second morning after, as he beamed at himself in the mirror, because it made him feel he was still attractive. He shouldn’t have needed reassurance, he scoffed to himself, of course he was – possibly more so than in his youth. More fully realised, less transparent and unfinished. And he still had _almost_ all of his hair.

Draco avoided the papers for a few days. He hadn’t been taken in for questioning. He’d managed to put away the memory of the Muggle Liaison Office, and, so far, the almost aimless, wandering chill that came with it hadn’t escaped its confines. It turned out it didn’t need to; it could come again in a whole new guise.

*

He was eating his breakfast when he saw the owls approaching through the window. They carried a parcel. He wasn’t expecting one from any reputable sender. He thought about just not opening the window, refusing to take this delivery of trouble. Whatever was afoot could just carry on without involving him. The owls’ faces glared at him though the glass. The owls alone would be hard to escape if they were really determined, let alone their employer, of whom Draco dreaded to think. Who was obviously _looking_ at Draco in a way Draco had never wanted to feel looked at again. This person knew who Draco was, had made him a part of their plan.

In a kind of submission to dread, he opened the window. The owls dropped their burden on the table and swooped out again without asking for payment. Absurdly hopeful at the last minute that the parcel was innocently unconnected to a serial killer’s stupid plot, Draco examined the brown paper for a return address, and looked inside it for a note. Nothing. Now he observed a ticking sound coming from the box. It did not encourage him to open it and his hands hovered. But he would obviously have to fetch in the Aurors and he would feel better and less cowardly in their presence if he knew he’d got up the nerve to open the horrible thing.

It was a chocolate cake. On it was written in green icing _MERCY YOU’RE 21!!_. That irritating flash of déjà vu. Draco couldn’t solve it and anyway he’d spotted the timer attached to the inside of the box. Four hours, thirteen minutes and a falling number of seconds until _something_.

Four hours thirteen minutes was actually probably too long to mentally prepare for something. And he had no real hope of the Aurors cracking the cake code and mounting a just-in-time rescue of whoever needed it, so the speed with which Draco scribbled a Howler and gave it to his owl was probably irrational. Then he rushed to put his shoes and socks on, and paced up and down.

It was Potter and Ribner who tumbled out onto the hearth. Draco pointed mutely to the box on the table. 

“I wonder if it could be a weird reference to mercy, abstract mercy, I mean,” said Ribner.

“I don’t know if I’m just imagining it, but with both this and the picture I had this feeling, just a little feeling, that I’d seen them before somewhere,” said Draco.

“Okay, I think there’s a bomb in there. We’re going to need to get someone to deal with it,” said Potter.

“Bombs kill people, don’t they?” asked Draco.

“Yep,” said Potter. “I would have got Teanby to find us someone, but obviously he’s dead, and hasn’t been replaced yet. We haven’t really got _time_ to worry about dealing with ordinary bomb disposal people. We’d better--”

“Try going through Teanby’s files,” said Ribner.

“And we’ll have to put you in one of the holding rooms, at least until the countdown is over. You’re obviously at risk. Better grab a book or something,” said Potter.

“Can’t I just go to work? Surely it’s basically as safe there?” asked Draco.

“No. Sorry. Someone could disguise themselves as a Ministry worker, and we’re much more cautious in the Auror Department. Someone might even _be_ a Ministry worker,” said Potter.

Draco couldn’t find any arguments, but he didn’t like the thought of sitting alone for hours, worrying.

Potter sent off a stag Patronus to tell a colleague to come and take Draco into protective custody. It reminded Draco of the resolution he kept making to conjure one himself someday.

Draco sat down and looked with distaste and discomfort at the intrusi¬ve presence of Aurors in his home.

“We’re working hard on this,” Potter said suddenly. “And we’re pretty competent. Maybe we’ll even finish it today.”

Draco was slightly at a loss. He almost said “Thanks,” but managed to just nod. He actually felt a little reassured. That was the whole point of Potter after all, right? He was the Chosen One, the one who mastered things. It was only later that it occurred to him to wonder if Potter suspected him and was making a threat, but even then, on consideration, he thought not. 

Draco spent some tiresome, anxious hours in a room probably the subject of some Fidelius variant. He attempted to relieve his feelings by demanding coffee and some cauldron cakes. He wondered what the Aurors were doing. He did not quite wish he was with them, or one of them, but he did feel lacking in the advantage they possessed of knowing all that was known of this unseen enemy. Draco was thrown back on considering what _he_ knew. He hadn’t had the pensieve itch for a while. Since the novelty had worn off, he’d usually had to be in a particular mood, moody, in fact, introspective, narcissistic, greedy for something unfulfilling. Often this frame of mind still left him flinching from more direct confrontations with what was on his mind. Now, though, Draco wanted to see. Maybe he could dredge up the source of the truncated association trail the picture and the cake set him on. See if he could make any connection that explained why he was being brought into this.

His palms sweated as the time passed and he was facing After Cake Timer time. He expected, sheltered as he was, for the room, his own body, to fly apart. He remained tensed for some time afterwards, and jumpily alert for longer still. Nobody came to see him. Draco began to think about calling some annoyed Auror just to assure himself there was still an outside world. He was still at the stage of saving it until he needed it when the door swung open, bouncing against the wall. It was only Potter. He looked weary and irritable, perhaps upset round the edges, and had the bloody cake box under his arm. He was in fact eating a slice of cake, fingers sunk into gooey chocolate icing.

“Well?” Draco demanded.

Potter subsided into a chair opposite him and sighed and shrugged his shoulders. Draco wasn’t getting the impression of good news. Not the promised breakthrough.

“The timer was a clue and the cake was a clue and the bomb was a distraction. A woman who works in the bakery in Diagon Alley was killed when the timer ran out. You know, no one could have got the rooftops thing ahead of time, but I really think we should have got this. We _could_ have got it, we just didn’t.” Potter took another bite of cake, his eyebrows drawn together.

Draco wasn’t used to Potter talking to him like this, and didn’t know what he was supposed to do when Potter basically expressed to him that he was having trouble with his feelings. He realised that, despite himself, Potter had become the Boy Who Lived to him, an inhuman public figure. The new murder itself seemed vaguely unsuitable material for comment.

“Did the cake come from that bakery?” asked Draco.

“Doesn’t seem like it, we did ask. Did you want some cake? The bomb’s been taken out of it and there’s nothing else wrong with it.”

“No thanks, I’ve been eating cauldron cakes all day.” It was lunchtime and Potter had no doubt had a tense morning without breaks, Draco told himself, a little put out by Potter cake-scoffing at a time like this.

“So. We’re not any nearer the killer right now and we really would like to try and get a handle on what _you’ve_ got to do with it. We’re thinking about sending you into hiding.”

Draco hesitated. No doubt the Aurors’ train of thought was that being in hiding would, as well as keeping Draco safe from the world, keep the world safe from Draco.

“We also thought that it might be better _not_ to do that, if someone is using you to create more associations and evidence for us. Evidence we haven’t worked out how to use yet, but it’s there.” Potter’s eyes were calmly assessing on Draco.

The Aurors were apparently turning over something of an ethical dilemma – be careful with Draco or consider whether _not_ being careful with him would ultimately foil the killer.

“You wouldn’t mention the second part if you weren’t hoping I’d understand where my duty lay,” said Draco.

“No, I seriously don’t want to pressure you,” said Potter, sounding quite earnest. “I just want you to be _informed_.”

Draco raised his voice over Potter. “I don’t actually want to go into hiding; it’d be boring and worrying. But I’m not going to actively try and be bait or whatever you had in mind. I’m going to stay with a friend.”

Potter looked as if he was kindly abstaining from pointing out what a fat lot of good that would be if anyone _really_ wanted to send him sinister parcels. Draco knew that already and right now it was beside the point. “We’re willing to go with what you’re comfortable with. Hopefully, there won’t come a point when we feel we should insist on it. We want you to come and extract the memories of the people who were in the bakery shortly before or at the time of the murder.”

“One of them could be the crazy serial killer,” said Draco. 

“That’s one of the things you’ll help us find out, yes,” said Potter.

It would soon become apparent if one of them was. Draco couldn’t really imagine that there’d be someone with the actual memory of killing inside them, so he didn’t bother to think how he’d feel about that. But the creep he’d feel discovering that something was just as wrong inside a probably quite acceptable seeming member of the human race – the white noise, the empty fizz of Obliviation or Imperius, the edge, never disguisable, of the false overlaying the true. Draco could imagine that.

“Probably the killer was Disillusioned and it’ll be unlikely anything will show up,” Draco pointed out, almost hopeful.

Potter’s face acknowledged this as he held the door open.

Draco was needed to practice a technique he had invented; that of extracting something of the subjective experience, isolating it from the bulk of unconscious knowledge present in the _whole_ memory. The half of the room that had not been paid attention to would be lightly sketched in, not reproduced from assumption, previous knowledge and snatches of subconscious awareness. Certain individuals loomed more vivid than others – the good-looking, the revoltingly sniffling. Snatches of conversation were recommended to the intruder’s attention. This kind of memory was useful, in conjunction of course with the more panoramic approach, because it often highlighted what was being sought. In this instance, no one had witnessed the murder itself, but uncertainly aimed magnifications of the bakery pre-murder might take them up closer to the grain of the killer’s modus operandi. 

In general, Draco found dealing with subjective memories made him like people more somehow. So limited, with a small but sometimes deep faculty of perception. So similar, always reminding him of his own memories on which he’d made his first experiments, but separate too, unique enough that they always rounded out a story more, no matter how many memories were collected of the same event. Draco had wanted to find a more personal way still, something that took him into the source’s bodily experience, to have their thoughts appear in his own mind, to smell what they smelt, to feel their wet feet or even their orgasms. Draco and Astoria had been quite eager to feel each other’s orgasms but, thus far, it seemed there was a divide between one person and another and one time and another that could not be breeched.

Draco was always gratified and flustered when he was temporarily placed in the same kind of officialdom as the Aurors, sat on the same side of a desk with one, facing the individual about to deliver their memory into their hands, or, more accurately, into the waiting pensieve. These days the Aurors usually managed to project a gracious sense of working _with_ Draco, rather than a sense of suppressed menace and that Draco had better do his job with no funny business. Every time Draco found himself grateful that he had crossed to the other side, the gratitude was quickly followed by the remembrance that it should be _him_ dispersing menace or graciousness.

The people from the bakery were, as witnesses asked to contribute to a criminal investigation so often were, positively asquirm with anxiety. Disturbed by what they had crossed paths with, frustrated by the interruption to their day, suspecting, almost always irrationally, that they would be suspected, they were sullenly silent even while forced into a kind of communication, or so full of talk and questions that the taking and viewing of their memories got postponed.

A prominent point of convergence between the memories was a man who wet himself while standing in the queue. He drew attention to himself by being so obviously surprised and horrified by the embarrassment. A woman behind the counter Banished the puddle on the floor and the man in front of the unfortunate, to whom he was in off-putting proximity, applied a Drying Charm to his robes. The incontinent offered apologies and protestations that it had never happened before.

“Distraction,” said Draco at the same time as Potter, when they were watching this occurrence for the second time.

“Definitely. What we want to find out is whether he’s a willing or unwilling accomplice,” said Potter.

The man in question was reluctant to give up his memory of the painful incident.

“We already know what happened,” Draco said impatiently.

“So you don’t really need _me_ to—”

“It’s your duty,” said Potter, delivering the phrase with all the stern encouragement one expected of the Boy Who Lived.

The man resentfully surrendered. The memory was quite intact, no signs of interference apparent. The magnifying, unedifying direction of the focus was convincing. When they resurfaced, Potter quizzed the man on whether he’d accepted anything edible or otherwise absorbed into the body from a stranger or any source without credentials. He said he couldn’t think of anything, which had to be taken with a pinch of salt, and Potter had someone take a sample of his blood.

The next memory they took revealed the most, in a way. Just before the incontinency episode, a woman watched a shadow flicker for a moment over a wall. Though it wasn’t really a shadow, not exactly, just a visual impression too indistinct to be anything else. The grain of everything was larger, somehow, in personalised impressions, and when Draco and Potter used the standard type of memory, the presence of a Disillisioned person was only detectable, insofar as it was detectable at all, because they knew it was there; the faintest disturbance in empty air.

“He hardly _needed_ the man to piss himself. Likes to go over the top,” said Draco, though analysing serial killers was Potter’s job.

“It doesn’t allow us the satisfaction of focusing on what little we’ve got. He obviously wants to be chased, and maybe caught, too, but he can’t resist being unkind to us,” Potter said.

“I’m sure he’s a completely loathsome person. I wish I didn’t have to think about him,” Draco snapped.

A slight pause. “It _could_ be a woman,” Potter offered.

Having physical evidence of the person who’d sent him ominous parcels made it all seem more real. Draco found it hard to shake off the chill, the sense of almost resigned doom that settled upon him. When he’d extracted all the memories, he went down to the Archive to catalogue them.

“Where’ve you been?” asked Grace. She and Ryan appeared unoccupied. “We were wondering whether we should tell someone, only we weren’t sure who.”

“I’ve been in the care of the Aurors. They should have let you know, really.”

“The Aurors?”

Draco couldn’t really see a way out of telling them. So for the first time, he told the dramatic tale of the serial killer from the newspapers who’d started involving Draco in his crimes. He was surprised to find he enjoyed it, despite his initial reluctance.

Grace and Ryan were a gratifying audience, and quick to see the implications for Draco’s peace of mind.

“I don’t think you should catalogue those memories, it’ll only keep you thinking about it,” said Ryan.

“I’ll do it!” said Grace. “I have to learn, anyway.”

Draco ignored what seemed like a reference to Draco’s retirement or death and uncharacteristically agreed.

After work he went home only to pack a bag, and Floo’d to Theo’s place, hoping Theo wasn’t still in the shop downstairs. By luck, he was just that moment coming in by the door.

“What’s with the bag?” asked Theo, at the same time as Draco announced “I’m staying with you for a bit.”

“ _Why_?” asked Theo, somewhat unwelcomingly. He remedied his tone by saying, “I mean, I suppose you can if you _want_.”

“I feel too much of a sitting duck at my place. The serial killer has been playing games with me.” And Draco told the story of the rooftop picture and Eric Teanby, and the cake bomb and Coralie Ensign.

“I wonder _why_ ,” said Theo at the end. “Did he choose you at random for someone to scare, or is there some kind of deep, significant pattern?”

“If only I knew,” said Draco. Theo’s calm seriousness settled his stomach even when not overtly soothing.

“When the Muggle Liaison guy was killed people wondered if there was a political agenda in it somewhere. But they’re already saying maybe there isn’t, because they can’t fit the baker woman or Joe Aveling in. If the press knew about you, it’d be different. Having you in the picture right away makes it look more political. Not necessarily _rightly_ so.”

Draco tried never to think about being an ex-Death Eater, and as these days he managed to go long stretches of time without being reminded to his face, he realised now that beyond the realms of unconsidered, automatic paranoia, he’d failed to ponder the relevance of it in this context.

“It doesn’t seem to simplify things. Who knows where the killer’s coming from? If he’s trying to make a point he’s fucking useless at it.”

“I think the most important thing is the Aurors and you. So far, we can’t be sure, but it sounds like things are alright,” said Theo.

“I don’t _think_ I’m their number one suspect,” Draco admitted. “Though that is exactly the sort of thing they’re supposed to conceal.”

“Just make sure you don’t act like you’re thinking too hard about the effect you’re having on them. Assuming you have to deal with them again,” said Theo.

“Where do you think it will all end?” asked Draco. He knew Theo couldn’t answer, but he wished he could believe that he could.

Theo knew Draco knew it was pointless to ask. He exhaled. “You can always go into hiding. You don’t even have to have the Aurors know where you are.”

“That’s true. I don’t think I’d go that far, though.”

“Anyway, if anything else happens it should give you more information. So, if you want to think positively, you shouldn’t _dread_ it--”

“But look _forward_ to someone being gruesomely killed!”

Theo had the sense to change the subject over dinner, and came up with a lot of customer-related grievances. Draco was glad to be with someone else. Somehow disaster seemed less likely to strike him in Theo’s flat than in his own.

He felt more resolved than relaxed as bedtime approached, though. Even before he’d had the serial killer to worry about he’d been feeling the itch, like something needed to be unpeeled, that he got as a precursor to a pensieve session. And now he felt he really ought to do all he could to discover why _him_. Go through his associations.

When Theo had gone to bed and was guaranteed not to interrupt for any reason, Draco retired to the spare room and got his pensieve out of his bag. Sitting cross-legged on the bed, he held his wand to his temple, and watched the memories coalesce in the basin. The silver-white milky mist spiralled and spilt into the thicker consistency of the dull-gold stands of subjective memory. Draco wanted a good variety with his most recent preoccupations meeting several layers of older memories, so he kept going for a while.

Draco liked, perhaps best of all, the moment when he first stirred the memories and they sparked and any surprising image, something he’d hardly noticed before or something he loved and was glad to see again might appear in the basin like a beautiful flower suddenly shooting up.

What he got now was Rain He Had Known. Rain dripping on window panes, strings of water lashing the ground, rain slanting into his own small, slightly shocked face in the days when he was not allowed to do magic. Draco waited patiently for the obvious carriage to bring up the rear in this train of thought: a slick of bloody water with the impress of his shoe sole in it. Then himself, his face young and fixedly sullen and tired, being interrogated by Aurors. His excuses, his protestations. No, he never did that – he wouldn’t. Yes, he did do that, like the witness said, but he had to. Trying to construct a new moral identity for himself as well as for the Aurors. Ryan Cobbing: “Being in the wrong place at the wrong time is a terrible thing.” Ryan Cobbing didn’t sink down into the basin, but lingered, going though the Miscellaneous memories like he had on his first day. Ryan. The timing, of course – he’d started at the Archive just before Draco received the painting. A montage of Ryan played as Draco’s blood ran a little cold and he thought. That seemed to be all, though, just the timing thing. Draco both relaxed and felt a little disappointed. It would have been good to find the killer. It would have been a better relief than feeling fairly sure it wasn’t Ryan. Even Potter, from his serene height, would surely be piqued to have a prophecy snatched from under his nose. Anyway. Now he’d thought about it he’d notice if Ryan did something strange.

The pensieve abruptly changed to show rainy rooftops that weren’t quite the Muggle Liaison Office rooftops, or the ones in the picture. They were replaced suddenly again by Daphne, sitting opposite him and talking and laughing on some occasion he couldn’t place. Astoria saying she wished she was in charge of tracking down the killer. A chain of himself doing what he was doing now, examining pensieves, stirring thoughts up with a wand. Potter winning at Quidditch, Potter being declared a hero – several of this small selection of Potter-being-declared-a-hero occasions were the potent, individualised kind of memory, and Draco could not help a laugh at his own expense to see the glorious close-ups of Potter’s face, magnifying any sign of gratification. Somehow resentment was inescapably implied in the very air against which Potter was outlined. Draco sighed and gave up hope of finding something useful. He prodded around the basin for good things to go to bed on; being a great father to Scorpius, fresh Spring days, that kind of thing.

*

Living with Theo was something of a relief to Draco anyway. There was no pressure to exert himself to get on with him, but living somewhere inhabited by someone else, listening to the plumbing when Theo took late-night baths, was just what Draco wanted right now.

Sadly, that was not the end of Draco’s involvement in creepy goings-on. He went to Diagon Alley to buy shoes. He was looking in the mirror at the pair he had on when someone screamed. He swung round and would have stared about him if the shop had not at that moment gone pitch black. Peruvian Darkness Powder? He would have taken his wand out of his pocket and tried _Lumos_ , but somehow he wasn’t sure that was a good idea. There was the sound of more shouting and running. The part of the shop Draco was in was a long way away from the door. He felt very isolated and suddenly realised the full horror of his situation as his skin prickled violently. He stood in the dark; he knew he should have a strategy, but what?

He’d just thought of fatherless Scorpius when a hand came down on his shoulder. He probably would have screamed if the hand hadn’t quickly clapped itself over his mouth.

“It’s me – Harry Potter,” a voice whispered in Draco’s ear. It _sounded_ like Harry Potter, and Draco was willing to assume that it probably was. He melted in relief more than he would have been completely comfortable admitting but the next moment they both froze. Someone was moving in the shop. An odd kind of scuffle as if someone was dancing on the spot. Then the sound of someone taking shoes off the shelves and throwing them about. One hit the side of Draco’s head.

Draco remembered Disapparation. Normally, he was nervous of splinching himself and never Apparated under stress, but he thought now was an exception. The only thing stopping him was Potter, who had pushed Draco behind him, an arm clamped round his back. If he went, he’d take Potter with him. Potter wasn’t going himself because it was his job to, if possible, bring in whoever was in the shop with them. Later Draco would look back at this train of thought and decide it was probably his best from the whole situation.

Right now, though, Harry was yelling “Stupefy!” as someone ran in a circle around them. Harry whirled round, taking Draco with him, but the spell didn’t hit anyone. Then the steps withdrew. Draco decided the person had Disapparated; somehow the shop felt different.

“ _Lumos_ ,” said Potter. A ray of light shone from his wand. Draco imitated him and together they advanced, probing the shop’s shadowy recesses. No one lurked there, though when Potter looked behind the counter he retreated hastily.

“Someone’s dead,” he said. He sighed. “We’ll have to investigate the scene later.”

They found something blocked them from nearing the door; an invisible force field repelled them. The light that ought to show through the door and window was blotted out by the darkness within, and they couldn’t hear anything from what must surely be a shocked Diagon Alley outside.

“The Aurors will be here to deal with it soon,” said Potter. He headed back to some seats.

“How did you know it was me and not the killer?” asked Draco.

“I caught sight of you just before the lights went out.”

They couldn’t have spent much more than half an hour in the dark shop together, but it was a depressing time, both of them longing for lights and busyness and people they knew. Draco wondered if the killer had followed him, and whether that was why the shoe shop had been targeted. He didn’t ask Potter in case he agreed that it was very probable. They gratefully seized on the subject of a quite different case which Draco had taken memories for recently.

*

Draco tried not to pay too much attention to the deaths that followed. The murder victim in the shoe shop had the letter “D” scored into their skin. Other victims had “I”, “M” and “C”. People often mused that the combination of letters seemed vaguely familiar but wasn’t bringing to mind a particular name or word. Draco had been afraid that first “D” stood for Draco, and could not help but be relieved it hadn’t been followed by an “R” or an “M”.

Then there was the thing Draco always tried to reduce down in his mind so it was more a fact than an experience. Pansy begged him to walk her crup while she and her husband were way for the weekend. Draco was knocked out and abducted and woke up in the Chamber of Secrets, worrying stupidly about Pansy’s crup. He scrambled to his feet when Potter charged in, summoned by some cryptic note. The serial killer was Polyjuiced as a student, so that was really weird and creepy. He tutted at both of them for not finding them out – he’d wanted them to, he said, he’d chosen Draco especially, but he’d let him down. Then Potter had just begun pitting his Auror skills against serial killer skills when the rest of the Aurors came in, as arranged. And Draco didn’t want to be rescued, but he kind of was.

Life began to retune itself after that, the signal having fuzzed over.

*

A strange time. Draco felt like nothing so much as an angry tired child who needed to go to bed. He wished he could stop time, go to bed, and come back and acquit himself better. People kept asking him questions in a rude, slightly threatening way that was not quite the interrogation of a suspect (he knew the difference, after all) and, mostly other, people being nice – tender and careful and congratulatory. He stopped paying much attention to who was who. Weasley clapped him on the back once and he was relieved to see that it was a reflex and he hadn’t really meant to do it to him. And then it was rather late and it seemed as if he’d have to chase after people to prolong the whole business, and he realised he could just go to bed. It seemed rather momentous, like it had been as a child to admit that his birthday was over. And so this day ended. He had strange dreams.

*

He hadn’t been up long and had just decided that his life was like a room out of which an ugly, dominating piece of furniture had been taken out – was the way it looked now the ultimate goal? Was that empty space an illusion or something to fill? – when he got an owl from Potter. He should meet Potter at the Ministry, Potter had things to tell him. Thought was succeeded by the happy rush of magnet meeting metal, and he dashed about as quickly as he could.

Draco approached Potter looking composed yet urgent.

“We’ve discovered more about who the killer is and how he was able to – to accomplish some of what he did.” Potter paused.

“I get it, something uncomfortable is coming up,” said Draco.

“He’s Luke Cobbing, Ryan Cobbing’s brother.”

Draco stared, subject to a peculiar hot and cold churning.

Potter looked sympathetic. “Ryan seems to have known about the murders from the outset, though you weren’t a factor in Luke Cobbing’s plan for a while. He took an Unbreakable Vow to help his brother, though we’re not sure under what circumstances. His attitude towards the murders is disapproving but not _enough_ , not like a normal person. And obviously it’s his brother, which might be a bit confusing for anyone.”

“And obviously Ryan was weird to start off with. _Fuck_ it. I seriously did almost know this, honestly I did. The picture and the cake were based on things from the Miscellaneous memories, weren’t they? And DIMC – Department of International Magical Cooperation, where their uncle works.”

“I believe so. I hope you won’t worry about it. I mean, some people go wrong and it matters. But within a limit almost all we do is make mistakes and we can’t beat ourselves up over it because it’s only rarely that we even get to make the connection. We can’t worry about a world in which things were different.”

It dawned on Draco that Potter was worried about the people who were killed while Draco wasn’t understanding what his pensieve was telling him, and was worried Draco was too. Draco hadn’t even got to that bit yet; he was still on taking it as a blow to his ego, that he could have appeared in a better light to himself and everyone else but had missed his chance. That unhappiness about the difference between them welled up, with a tinge of curious sympathy.

“Did you make mistakes?” he asked.

“Of course I made mistakes. We never actually fucking caught him, he came to us!” Potter flushed but didn’t shout.

Draco was fascinated by the idea that they shared the same failure. But Potter’s failure was intrinsically of a different calibre to Draco’s.

“And you’re trying not to worry about it?”

“That’s right,” said Potter. “I’m sure the Daily Prophet will pick up on the fact that I personally haven’t kept anyone safe from Luke Cobbing. I don’t know if you’ll enjoy that.”

Draco opened his mouth but didn’t in the end say anything. He felt an urge to be nice, make Potter feel better, assure him that he didn’t take pleasure in things that made him feel bad, but ultimately felt crippled by awkwardness about committing himself to a Potter-positive position – which was absurd, seeing as it could only be politic.

“We’re getting off track. Other things to tell you... Unbreakable Vows are always interesting when we get to the trial. After they’ve been made, choices are very limited and the individual is, in a way, acting under duress. But the individual usually _chooses_ to make a vow it is their responsibility to avoid. Would you like me to pass on a message from Ryan?”

Draco was finding the subject of Ryan repugnant, and didn’t really feel he would like. But it was a temptation he couldn’t resist, all the same. “Go on then.”

“He said he was very sorry about it all.” Draco snorted. “And that he wished he could have worked with you under different circumstances. He thought things could have been very different.” This seemed more allusive than a mere apology and Draco felt even more nauseated and insulted. He remembered his own thoughts, the lust he’d squandered every now and then on such an undeserving object. At least Ryan had been considerate enough not to take him up on it. Though who knew what the terms of his Vow were. Draco wondered whether Potter thought he _had_ been taken up on it. Passing on messages from criminals seemed a little out of place in an Auror.

Draco shrugged. “Well, I don’t need to have all my feelings about it now; I’ll be reading about it in the papers for months.”

“True. There’s a press conference later today but a lot won’t come out until the trial stage. It seems like there’s something more to tell you, but I don’t think there is.”

“It does all seem suddenly more... life-sized,” said Draco. “Anyway, I’ll get back to my life, nothing more for you to worry about here, thanks.”

“Oh yeah, the other thing I was going to tell you: this is your recommendation to have some counselling session at St. Mungo’s,” said Potter, with what Draco imagined to be habitually deliberate casualness.

“I won’t, but thank you.”

They bid each other farewell a little awkwardly. Draco felt empty as he left the Ministry and was relieved to remember he was going somewhere.

*

“Where’s Robert?” he asked Astoria.

“In a drugged sleep. We were up all night having a deep emotional conversation, it was pretty exhausting. Hopefully we won’t be having any more of them.”

Draco had prepared himself to embark on a deep emotional conversation if it was desired, and was pleasantly surprised to find himself wrong-footed.

“Strange having the killer caught, isn’t it? There’s nothing to look forward to now,” Astoria continued.

Draco laughed. “I’ve been feeling really strange since yesterday without managing to sum it up.” He hesitated. “Do you want to know what I know or...”

“Oh yes, tell me how it happened.”

“I’m sorry I didn’t work it out,” said Draco when he’d covered the facts.

“I wouldn’t be too sorry. I think I’d only have been jealous of you.”

“Oh, right. I’m sorry on my own behalf, too,” he admitted.

“Oh, yes, of course, you would be.” Astoria paused and said, as Draco was thinking, “There’s been time to forget how you work. I don’t think you should be, if that’s any comfort. In fact, I’m firmly opposed to it. Don’t act like you’ve failed a test set by _that_. You’d have to allow him the right to judge you, and that would be absurd.”

“Good point,” said Draco. He didn’t say that Cobbing wasn’t so much a problem in himself, but in as much as Draco let himself succumb to the notion that he represented the universe. Maundering on about his issues to his ex-wife at a time like this would be absurd, he mercifully realised before he embarked on it.

Astoria asked questions about the impression Draco had gained of Luke Cobbing during their brief encounter. She didn’t seem to find his brief answers satisfactory and came out into the open.

“Do you think that _if_ I were allowed to visit him, I would be able to ... get to him? Work upon his mind, make him feel painful remorse and torment?”

“Not without Dark magic, and you don’t want to get into trouble,” said Draco. “I think evil maniacs are just... blank. I can’t imagine you getting a purchase on his mind.”

Astoria looked as if she felt he was underestimating her powers a little, but not as if she’d made up her mind to prove it.

After that, Draco wondered who he could go and talk to next. There were his parents, and Pansy, who apparently had her crup back and was feeling weirdly guilty about asking him to walk it, but he hesitated. Suddenly that moment in the Chamber of Secrets when he’d sworn revenge on Harry Potter came back to him, vividly intact and unexpected. He was inclined to laugh and think of himself as a child in a sulk, full of a resolve at once absolutely real and unreal to run away from home and make Father sorry. Just as he was about to sweep those thoughts away, the figure of Potter bobbed to the surface, as Draco had seen him then. Almost deliciously infuriating, encouraging in Draco the animalistic desire to snap at him. The intoxicating, swaggering conviction that he should be the one to stop Potter being _too much_. Change the rules for him. Something. He wouldn’t let this feeling slip away. He would leap on it and let it take him somewhere new. Today was the first day of the rest of his life. Draco was tired of waiting for things to happen or finish happening to him, and hoping it wouldn’t be too painful. This was not what he’d expected his moment to look like but then unexpectedness was how you knew things were real.

Draco almost reached for parchment and quill with which to work on a strategy, but realised the unwisdom of leaving a record. Punishing Potter for always being... Draco’s mind had already stuttered to a halt. It was hard to put into words exactly what he resented Potter for. But it didn’t matter. He had this feeling and it was strong and right now what would give him the most satisfaction was doing something about it. The most obvious suggestion to suggest itself was aiming at Potter’s integrity. Blackening his reputation or even corrupting him in actuality. Headlines flashed into his head. Draco decided to ignore the sense of discomfort at what he was doing, the way he was reminding himself of his adolescent years and the way he would have loved everyone to agree there was nothing special about Potter at all, for Potter to be humiliated by his stripping of glory. He held onto that still delicious idea of a Potter who wasn’t _Potter_ , but, despite the appeal, was forced to drop it. He was too much a part of the wizarding world who bought into Potter as something that made it feel good about itself.

The simplest approach of all: making Potter suffer? Draco thought of seducing his ex-wife and appropriating his children and basically living the part of Potter’s life that Potter _didn’t_ get. Draco liked this one a lot, but sadly it was fatally flawed. He would bounce right off Ginny Weasley if he ever tried to get near her, and dealing with her and the Potter children had no appeal. The day-by-day part of living Potter’s life would, he suspected, hurt him more than it hurt Potter. There was the Barty Crouch/Moody approach, which Draco felt he might as well touch on in this trajectory. Even in his somewhat manic form of mind, this was way too creepy. He found picturing the Draco he would have to be to do that somewhat amusing, though.

The real idea, the idea he hadn’t been aware of circling around but felt he must have been when the shot of recognition went through him – seduce Potter himself and, probably, break his heart. Draco imagined it; he would feel as if the air around him was crackling with power, and Potter’s face would be puzzled as he began to wield it. He slid down on his back across the sofa and kicked his legs over the am with glee. Draco was no stranger to the beautiful idea, the consoling fantasy. But rarely, very rarely, did he wade into the beauty to see if it remained the same as reality rippled it.

He could see at once that sincerity was the bait. It was too late to perform charm, polished and urbane. Draco had learned that he was not his father. He was surly and obvious and impatient. He didn’t think, though it made him a little sore to admit that he knew it, that Harry was to be dazzled by glitter, anyway. Though he didn’t, perhaps, need to be humble and sweet. Maybe Potter was not immune to the draw of the tense, grudgy, fractious old rivalship. He thought of it, Potter’s look and touch, and his imagination shorted out. He wanted terribly to be too close to Potter. He would try and cope with it when it happened, if it ever did. Draco was a little surprised to feel in himself the confidence that he could make Potter be interested in one or another of his selves.

He left it there. He would try things at the right time which would present itself in due course. And fuck it, he should cheer up. No mad killer on his back. He was free!

*

Draco went into work the next morning without thinking about it. He found himself halting as he entered the office.

“Hard not to _stick_ , isn’t it?” said Grace, looking up. “At least, we can say quite truthfully that we never really liked him.”

“Always thought there was something funny about him,” Draco said wryly.

The subject of Ryan seemed to draw them like a tongue to a sore tooth. It was not so much that they had a trust in him betrayed by his proximity to and abetting of violence, creepiness and evil, but that somehow they found themselves comforted by the process of pointing this out. Ryan probably wished he was here, Draco realised suddenly.

“Now that it’s over – in a way – the Beltane Ball won’t have that awkwardness to it,” Grace said.

“Oh yes,” said Draco. “I’d forgotten about that.” He made a face. “More self-congratulatory speeches than usual, I bet.” He thought about the discomfort he usually experienced at the Ball – it was one of the wizarding customs the Ministry was keen on, and was celebrated on May Day, the day before the Battle of Hogwarts anniversary, treated as an adjunct to that occasion. Draco felt prickled by unfriendly looks at certain points during the speeches, and was unsure whether he should appear to be enjoying himself or solemn and cowed. Usually, of course, it was one of the most prolonged periods of the year in which he saw Potter, if one counted literally seeing him rather than engaging with him. One of its trials, normally. But it struck Draco that it might be a useful time to approach Potter and begin his campaign. Providing he wasn’t monopolised too much, anyway.

*

Pansy had to come with him. “You have to,” he told her, seeing her wrinkled nose. “I used to spend most of it in a corner with Astoria. I didn’t go last year.”

“And I bet Astoria put it on her “Divorcing Draco: the Pros” list. You should actually test out what they say about beginning a new slate and forgetting old quarrels and ask women to dance. They wouldn’t dare refuse you. So what if they’re frosty?” Pansy was starting to get belligerent.

“You’re missing the point,” said Draco. He knew why Pansy didn’t want to go; while she could carry off meeting people who still remembered her as the enemy, it wasn’t something she actively enjoyed and Beltane was awkward. Also, and this was really it, she didn’t want to go with Draco, Head of the Pensieve Archive. It didn’t put her on the loftily self-sufficient footing of her and her husband Perseus’s careers, and people would, Draco had to admit, remember more clearly what they held against both of them on seeing them together.

“I need someone of my own there,” Draco said. 

“You need someone of your own on a permanent basis. You can’t ask someone as an actual date?” But she was relenting.

*

It was not, in fact, too bad this year. People kept asking him about Luke Cobbing. Draco wanted terribly to make a marvellous story out of it and imply all sorts of things about his own role in it, but somehow he hadn’t the heart. Not to do more than very faintly imply, anyway. Before the fires were lit the Minister made a speech about how safe they all felt now thanks to the Aurors’ tireless work, with his hand on Potter’s shoulder, and after the fires were lit he made a speech about how they all felt safe now there was peace and tolerance in the Wizarding world, with his hand on Potter’s shoulder. And that seemed to be it. Usually Potter said something. Perhaps he’d demanded compensation for stress this year in the form of being let off speech-making. Not that he’d get off doing it at Hogwarts tomorrow. And not that Draco would be there. 

Draco stared across at Potter like he always did, at points, during these occasions, as though Potter wasn’t quite real, or was on the other side of a two-way mirror. He wasn’t even disoriented when Potter seemed to grasp the other end of his gaze and, frowningly, follow it back. But when Potter’s face was indisputably turned to his and he gave him a small smile before turning away, Draco was jolted. He swung round himself, flushing.

But it was easy not to take himself or others too seriously tonight. Someone had disinterred another old custom and everyone was garlanded with flowers and looked like an illustration from a calendar or a children’s book. Draco plunged into the crowd and, quite at random, as the band struck up, asked a witch to dance. She smiled graciously and allowed him to lead her onto the floor. He looked round and saw Pansy smirking in relief, hand extended to meet that of a respectable wizard. He danced four times more, once with Pansy and once with Grace, and thought that he had paid his dancing dues now. He talked to Jonathan Dickleton, who had been taken on by the Ministry as part of his parole at the same time as Draco. He’d risen from the Document Archive to the glamour of Unspeakable, but he hadn’t retracted his and Draco’s grateful latching onto each other.

And then Draco spotted Potter, standing alone, apparently feeling also that his dancing duty was done. (Poor Potter. Draco had been watching him every ball for years try to make excuses and only dance once or twice without appearing rude.) As he watched, Potter walked away, perhaps to find a friend or to make his way out to find a lavatory. Now was it, the time, his moment.

Draco hurried after Potter while trying not to look as though he was hurrying. He hoped it didn’t look too much like a scuttle with skips in it. He arrived just behind Potter. “Potter,” he said to Potter’s back, in the calm, pleased tone of someone who’d remembered that yes, he would like to talk to that person, now they were inches away. Potter’s shoulders looked pretty broad, he noticed.

Potter turned round, not looking actively pleased perhaps, but polite and ready to engage.

“I think I’d like to talk to you a bit, if you don’t mind?” asked Draco.

“Sure.”

Draco found it hard to be sincere standing up in a ballroom only slightly distanced from the crowd, but the plunge had to be taken.

“Going through something like – Cobbing – has brought up the past for me. Somehow I’ve always seen you as the anti-me, even after we left school, which is obviously a bit sad. And with this stuff recently, you were the anti-me near me more often than usual. I kept falling back into old thought-patterns and it didn’t help an already difficult experience. I want not to resent you. I want to feel you don’t resent me – if you ever think about me.” (Draco couldn’t help adding that last bit.) “Could we do a quick re-enactment of that first train ride to Hogwarts?” He stuck out his hand. 

Potter, looking surprised, shook it. “Well. It’ll be nice to think there are no hard feelings, definitely. I haven’t resented you, you know, not since the end. I don’t _think_. I’ve tried not to have more bitter feelings than I can help.” He looked embarrassed.

“And I think I’ll just offer a blanket apology for being such a horror in school,” said Draco, with a wry, self-aware smile.

Potter smiled too and was obviously trying to remember if he should apologise too. Draco could have thought of a few things, but that would not show the forgive and forget attitude he was going for. Potter had thought of something, his mouth was opening, but Draco interrupted him.

“I won’t keep you, I’m sure there are plenty of demands on you.” He walked on, feeling pleased with himself. It had hardly stuck in his craw at all, saying that, not like it would have twenty years ago. And Potter could surely buy it more now than he could have done twenty years ago. An apology that takes all that time to mature must be of a high quality when finally brought into the light, right? Draco was startled to realise he felt empty somewhere, in a warm, room-to-stretch-out way. Maybe he’d, well, meant what he’d said. On some level. It was a strange idea to contemplate. He experimented, pretended he was a person who’d say it and mean it for the purpose of getting on with their life. It felt quite nice apart from the wave of panic at the thought of the “rest of his life” part. For a moment, Draco had wavered in his resolve. But no, Potter was going to be what Draco did next. It didn’t hurt to experiment with other ways of unburdening himself of his Potter issues.

He looked around him. The band was playing something fast and jolly and everyone looked not quite themselves, with the flowers and formalwear. For the first time Draco felt the ball to be, like all festivities were meant to be, a time apart from real time. Next year, he didn’t know how, but he knew things would have changed.

*

The next day was, as some people called it, Potter Day, and a day off work. Draco thought of Scorpius at Hogwarts experiencing a day of solemnity. Potter would be giving a speech to him, amongst others, about good and evil and the importance of moral courage and love (Draco had been mandated to attend the first anniversary). He and Astoria had been careful to bring Scorpius up knowing what was and wasn’t said in public, but Draco realised now he wasn’t sure what Scorpius did think of all that. He hoped he didn’t feel too uncomfortable on occasions like this, weighed down by inherited guilt placed there by Draco and Lucius or his fellow students. He suspected not, not to any real degree. Scorpius still seemed so _simple_.

As usual on this day, Draco thought a bit about unpleasant memories, and managed not to think any further. Daphne had fought at the Battle, and Astoria had, of course, wanted to fight too. So they used to talk about it a bit, and not from a perspective Draco was comfortable with. He would feel more comfortable chalking that up as an advantage of divorce if Daphne wasn’t dead,

He spent a lot of time thinking, not about these things, but about things that didn’t matter. It was only the next day, when he was back at work, that he began thinking about Potter, and plans. Now he had laid a groundwork that should disarm suspicion, instead of approaching him directly again and perhaps risking that, he should probably think of situations that would throw him and Potter together (again) without revealing his connivance. Shame he was thinking of serial killers rather than this when Luke Cobbing had kind of done it for him.

Draco was not really disrupted from these thoughts when he opened a paper aeroplane that landed on his desk. 

_Dear Draco, I feel a bit awkward about this, considering everything, so excuse this letter. Would you like to have dinner with me? Tonight is fine for me, but let me know if you’d prefer another time. Or, of course, if you’d rather not go at all. Harry._

Draco physically recoiled, leaning back in the chair and feeling like the Aethonon he’d seen rear up once when startled by something. Grace looked up and he quickly assumed a slightly bored expression. Had Potter somehow worked out what he was up to and decided to cruelly bait him? This seemed the most likely explanation, yet even this seemed impossible when Draco thought about it. If Potter had leapt to the right conclusion, it was, admittedly, the right one, but considering the evidence available to Potter it was also _some leap_. Maybe Potter had access to detective instruments of sophistication beyond anything Draco knew about. He laid aside these thoughts for a minute and began on another track. Why would Potter, quite off his own bat, ask him to dinner? Draco hadn’t started trying to be fascinating yet and he was forced to admit that if Potter had managed to form an attraction to him all by himself it was _baffling_. The idea ought to be nice, thrilling even, but somehow it left him furiously confused, even upset. Let’s say Potter was sincerely drawn to Draco and wanted to have dinner with him. Would Draco have been pleased to get a letter from anyone else saying “considering everything else I feel a bit awkward about this” and offering him a get-out?

Frowning, Draco vigorously scrawled below Potter’s note “ _Come down here and see me, please. I don’t understand._ ”

It chafed; he wanted to choose an approach himself and have it be the right one. But being open could be considered a tactic if his plan was still valid.

Potter had a busy job, Draco reminded himself as the minutes passed and Potter did not materialise. Or perhaps it had been a practical joke and its purpose had been fulfilled. Thank God he hadn’t said “Yes, I would love that!” Surely though, that wasn’t really Potter’s style, and at their age. Not to mention that, if the aeroplane came from Potter, as he suddenly doubted, it was actually a guileless gesture on his part. The _Daily Prophet_ would surely be glad to buy it from Draco, if he’d offered. Merlin, if he’d wanted revenge (he was beginning to feel the need of a different word) perhaps he’d just missed his moment.

Potter opened the door, looking strained. He jerked his head to indicate that Draco should follow him outside.

“What don’t you understand? Do you mean you don’t believe me or...”

“Yes.”

“Okay. Well, I... would like to get to know you better. Maybe in the finding-you-attractive way. I wouldn’t be surprised if you didn’t want to, so don’t feel bad about saying it. But I would like it.” Potter spoke quickly, nervously but clearly.

“I would like to go as well, then,” said Draco. He smiled at Potter for what felt like, and probably was, the first time.

Potter smiled back, looking relieved but still a little afraid. They arranged things quickly, a restaurant, a time.

A date with Potter. Draco would feel more enthusiastic about it if he could believe it.

*

When he was there, sitting opposite Potter, at a romantically lit table, Draco found himself watching the alert tilt of his head, sometimes dipping in self-deprecation, and his mouth, set in pleasant determination that this would go well. His skin looked soft in this light. Draco wanted to get to the point and _touch_.

“That getting-to-know-you stage. I don’t like it much and it probably _is_ a bit more awkward when it’s me and people are... I try to choose well, and they want to be there because they like the real me, but they don’t know the real me yet and it feels like we’re both trying too hard,” said Potter, trying to give a fuller explanation of why they were both here.

“So you thought that because getting to know me _should_ be difficult, it might actually be easier?” asked Draco.

“Yeah! I like a challenge.”

Draco felt his lips curve. Look at what he seemed to have found easiest himself after Astoria – not find a nice witch or perhaps a wizard this time and start again, but seduce the Boy Who Lived and possibly dump him to cheer himself up.

“And, I don’t know, I started seeing similarities between us. We’re both bisexual and just getting over divorce, after all.”

Draco remembered how the Wizarding world knew Potter was bisexual. He and Ginny Weasley had broken up for a year or two, a while before they got married, and Potter had had a fling with Viktor Krum, which was discovered by the press,

“That Viktor Krum thing,” said Draco. “I couldn’t decide who I was jealous of. What was he like?”

“Well, he’s a good bloke but in the end I thought he was better in bed than out of it. Hermione seemed to discover his hidden depths better than I did when she was fourteen. Lots of silences that seemed moody but probably weren’t really.”

Draco thought he should have left the question until it was more acceptable to clarify, what Krum was like _in bed_.

“Had you lost interest in Quidditch, then, weren’t into talking about that?” asked Draco.

“I had, actually. Of course, I lost interest in that last year, and then, it seems funny now, but I got kind of superstitious about it. I think I thought,” and here Potter blushed and hesitated, “that I’d given it up as part of my youthful innocence. Of course, it was kind of tricky with Ginny. But then James got into it and I started playing with him and going to games.”

“James is on the Quidditch team, isn’t he?” asked Draco.

James was. They talked about the personality types associated with the various Quidditch positions and how Albus and Lily both refused to be interested in Quidditch at all, Albus more because he just wasn’t sporty and Lily more because of her mother being a professional and Harry still being the most talked about Hogwarts Quidditch player.

“Scorpius likes Quidditch but he always said he just wasn’t interested in trying out for Hufflepuff’s team. He isn’t competitive, but I did wonder if not wanting to draw attention to himself had something to do with it. You know. Being a Malfoy.”

“I think if anything is going to stop people harking back to what “Malfoy” used to mean, it’s a Malfoy getting into Hufflepuff. Though the name suggests you were doing your damndest to hark back.” Potter looked as if he thought he might have offended, but couldn’t stop himself. Draco was not keen on the names of Potter’s children, if it came to it, but the dead people connection put them beyond the realm of criticism he felt comfortable making.

“For some reason, when he was born I couldn’t bear to give him anything but one of the most _Malfoy_ names. I wasn’t sure then what I’d like Scorpius to be like, whether I wanted him to be unfashionably traditional in defiance of the people who went off our family, or a diplomat, someone who’d get them to like us. Of course, he just was, it had nothing to do with me.” He talked about Scorpius, and how he’d been surprised by and then welcoming of so many things about him. He could see Potter nodding along, identifying with him and approving of such a nice human side. Then he felt guiltily aware of _using_ Scorpius, and remembered properly how great he was, and ended up going on longer. Then there was a pause. 

“Are you still close to your ex-wife’s family?” asked Draco.

“Oh yeah. What was awkward was that it was actually Ginny who got a bit frozen out by her mum for a while there. But really, when you have children, there’s no breaking the ties, is there?”

Draco was silent. Their family had been perfectly nice and close and everything, but after the marriage broke down there had been an automatic separation of Malfoys and Greengrasses. He didn’t like Harry insinuating, unconsciously yes, that what he had was a pallid approximation of the real thing.

“Do you get on with Ginny, now?”

Harry rubbed his hair. “It wasn’t a question of not getting on – not for me and not even for her, I don’t think. We don’t speak alone much now. When we do it’s kind of just like it always was. Which is weird. But it doesn’t last long enough for it to have to be different.”

“Over it at all? I think I’m getting over mine,” Draco said smugly. 

“You made me think about it!” Harry protested. “I guess I’m over it enough to want to move on. Maybe not so over it that I can always believe it happened.”

“Poor Potter.” Draco almost meant it. The last bit had been a touch too self-pitying. But all through the meal, facing Harry, he’d noticed a weight of seriousness about him. Something habitually effortful. What he needed was someone fun to give him a holiday. Draco didn’t think he could really undertake to be that person, even though he was supposed to be in seduction mode. The snarlingly stimulating school rival he could have done, but Draco was beginning to suspect that wasn’t what Harry wanted.

Harry smiled at him. “I feel very middle-aged tonight, do you?”

“I’m not flattered. I suppose you mean the civilisation of it?” Draco looked about him. He thought they were finished here. “Your place or mine?”

“Mine.”

*

Draco had found himself taking control when they got to Harry’s flat, pushing him into the bedroom, and being slow about undressing so he could look at Harry’s hurriedly revealed body. Harry seemed eager, having undergone a burst of energy. He let Draco handle him, almost as if he were something he thought of buying, familiarising himself with his contours, the texture of his skin and hair, his smell, and, of course, his cock, though he didn’t want to give him too much too early. Draco loved the feel of Harry’s cock jutting into his palm. He could see so much on Harry’s face, the pleasure he didn’t give into, the warmth of finding himself given attention, the impatience to get into Draco’s pants, the flickering comparing of the man he was to the Draco Malfoy in his head. Draco tried to catch and define and remember everything, though really he knew he was going to be rewatching it in a pensieve later.

And now he was lying on his back, legs spread open and Harry kneeling between them, rocking his cock just a little up into the warm, wet suction of Harry’s mouth. He was torn between closing his eyes and trying to completely lose himself in the sensation, and wanting to prop himself up on his elbows to stare at the exact shape of Harry’s lips stretched around his cock. He reached out and wrapped his fingers in Harry’s hair, which inspired him to take Draco’s cock deeper into his mouth. This seemed to have been a mistake, and Harry lifted his mouth off to cough.

“Do you want to fuck me?” he asked. He seemed determined to please, which was funny seeing as Draco had imagined himself taking on that role.

While Harry got out the lubricant and, after a moment’s hesitation, offered it to him, Draco tried to immerse himself into the prospect of that world of skin-to-skin, of bodies, that offered him the clarity he longed for right no. Because against all his expectations, this thing, this “let’s be nice grown-ups and sleep together” thing with Harry Potter was fucking scary. He reminded himself of a teenage about to lose their virginity and almost willing to run away rather than to have what they most desired. His angry amusement at his own absurdity forced an expression into his face which Potter took as a sign to lay on his stomach, his legs spread, holding his erection but not fondling it too much.

Draco touched the hollow of his back, dragging his palm over the rise of Potter’s buttocks, allowing his finger to lightly trace Potter’s crack. He ruffled the hairs on Potter’s inner thighs and roughly massaged the skin near Potter’s balls. He squeezed Potter’s balls. Potter squirmed a little; in pleasure, Draco hoped. Then he uncapped the lube and smeared a little on Potter’s arsehole. He didn’t bother taking too much time fingering. He put a couple of finger in and stabbed and stretched them. Potter seemed to like it. He lubed up his cock. With Potter facing away from him, he got more into it. He reached round to grasp Potter’s hips and pull them off the mattress. Potter tried to move his legs out of the way and managed to make Draco stumble. Succeeding in not making an irritated noise, he arranged his knees on either side of Potter’s and pulled Potter’s arse cheeks apart. Once he was partly inside he slid home all at once. Potter pushed his arse back at him and steadied himself with his hands. Potter was responsive, and while he was largely concentrating on pounding him into the mattress, Draco recovered some of that awed enthusiasm with Potter’s body. 

He fell asleep trying not to be too conscious of Harry’s breathing.

Draco was nudged awake. He screwed his eyes up and found Harry Potter leaning over him. Harry Potter began to laugh.

“You’ve forgotten where you are, haven’t you? You look like I’ve broken into your house.”

Draco had indeed been boggling at him and wondering what he was doing there. He laughed self-consciously and, still disorientated, squinted at his watch.

“It’s morning. You have to get going a little later than me, but you know.”

In other words, he was offering breakfast rather than a wake-up call just as he left himself.

Draco was given coffee and installed by the toaster to await his toast while Harry boiled himself an egg and he tried to decide whether the previous night had been a success or a failure. Or just plain mediocre. Harry seemed cheerful enough, if not particularly intimate – keeping up a fairly constant chit-chat about nothing in particular. Draco became conscious of the way he was brooding and roused himself to respond in similar mode. He longed to ask Harry what he was thinking, what they were even doing here, being pleasant over breakfast when they hardly knew each other. He wanted to be with a friend suddenly, someone who knew him. He was too old for this. But he didn’t ask anything.

*

It seemed possible to Draco then that things would end there – that there was not as much between them as he had thought. But things tottered on in their uncertain, unpredictable way.

It was curiosity that impelled Draco to owl Harry asking him to come over a couple of nights later, despite the contradictory urge to make no move he wasn’t invited to make. Curiosity, the desire to poke, took him over sometimes.

Harry was more ruffled that night – his hair literally so. He had a touch of stubble. He’d come to find out what Draco was like, not so much to present himself. Draco was short with him as he hovered in the living room and awkwardly talked about how he’d just got off work. He told him what he wanted him to do and Harry quickly caught on and responded in like fashion.

Draco was on his back, Harry on top of him. He found it was better this way, “facing his fear” he thought impatiently, assuming it was Harry turning away that had sent him into that distant state of mind before. He listened to the blood thudding in his ears and followed the other rhythm he and Harry had going as they fucked.

He liked being in his own flat in the morning, better able to be his short-tempered morning self as if Harry just happened to be there.

“I think I thought you’d be tidy,” said Harry. “You’re not, very.”

That night left Draco calmer than the first. He thought perhaps he should stop letting himself feel like he had done, not only about Potter the last little while, but about Astoria. As if the success or failure of himself depended on things between them being how he wanted them. Perhaps it would be the right thing for both his bad old self and the self of tomorrow to nip in the bud whatever connection Harry hoped they could make. Draco could get on with his life and learn to appreciate its simple joys and all that.

But things went on, somehow, even as he considered stopping it. They even went for drinks, furtively, after work, and went to places and did things while they laughed at themselves and admitted to being two forty-year-olds who hadn’t dated in years. They lingered in each other’s flats after sex. Draco was beginning to believe Harry was a real person. He was beginning to know how to get specific responses out of him; the different smiles which meant different kinds of amused and pleased, the suspicious look just before he realised Draco was winding him up, surprise, anticipation. It went on, like eating something delicious until one felt nausea ought to have set in. It was better when they had the confidence to stop being polite, weren’t afraid they’d fight painfully if they weren’t prevented.

They learnt about each other’s jobs. Draco found that it was interesting to often have a different perspective on stories in the _Prophet_. He started to actually worry about Harry. He didn’t seem so invulnerable now. Harry remembered that Draco had probably seen the memories Snape had given him, and talked about their role in changing his lifeview, teaching him things about love and bravery and how what really mattered lasted longest. He saw a lot of meanings Draco hadn’t. Maybe, he found himself thinking, Harry really was _just that great_. He was okay with that thought. He wondered if he should hate himself. But he didn’t. He felt it was okay that he wasn’t Harry Potter. And then they talked about Snape, which was a strange topic, Snape being a strange man.

The sex mattered, of course. It both changed how things were between them and was changed. Draco learnt how to make Harry respond how he wanted in bed, too. He learnt that they both liked it more often than not when Draco was in control, that Harry liked being told what to do, that Draco often felt an amount of tenderness and euphoria he found it difficult to control when he felt Harry trusted him. Harry learnt when Draco wanted to be fucked, and when hard, and when gently. Sometimes it was intense and rough, but Draco found that on the whole Harry was more leisurely and relaxed than he’d expected. Draco relaxed more.

They got to know each other’s friends through the other’s conversation. It was a little strange. Harry could ask with accuracy whether Pansy had responded a certain way when Draco told her something, but neither of them pretended personal enthusiasm or sympathy for these people.

Hogwarts broke up for the summer, and then, at the same time that Draco and Harry saw each other much less, they were forced to take stock of the fact that they _had_ been seeing each other a lot. It began to seem like they had a secret. Draco had never contemplated telling his friends and family that he was fucking Harry Potter, but now he contemplated, amused and awed, the impossibility of doing so.

Harry was swept along by a wave of Weasley family activity, and Draco, Astoria and Scorpius managed to put in quite a lot of time as a family too, and went on outings. Scorpius was at the age for disdaining that kind of thing, but this year at least he seemed to be glad of it. Draco tried not to engage him in too many earnest father-son talks.

It wasn’t as if either of them was having a terrible time, but it did make the times they spent together particularly bright. Draco couldn’t help feeling warmly satisfied that Harry obviously made a point of seeing him. When the kids were back at school they settled back into their routine, perhaps more into it than they had been before. That felt warm and comforting, though it was less comforting when Draco realised he now wasn’t afraid _of_ Harry but of losing him. He seemed now to encapsulate a world not of glittering glory but sweet, earthy normality and rightness. He neutralised so much of Draco’s uneasiness.

“I think we should tell people,” said Harry, a few weeks after term began. Draco froze. “Not publically, I suppose, if we can help it, but people. Family and friends. Maybe we could even make an effort and meet each other. I’d like to meet Scorpius over the Christmas holidays.”

Draco agreed, firstly because what a lovely sign of trust and commitment and willingness to make an effort for Draco, and partly because he’d decided telling people would be fun. Draco enjoyed it, anyway, though Harry seemed a lot more deliberately patient and effortful about their reactions. Draco practically rolled on the floor when Harry described Weasley’s astonishment, though neither it nor the things Harry wasn’t mentioning were complimentary. When it came to in-person meetings, Draco admitted he was touched and impressed by how well his own and Harry’s connections coped with the bizarre social situation.

And then there was the night when Harry said, “When we first started, I felt a bit like I was using you. For distraction, I suppose. I felt like I didn’t know what I was doing, so I might as well do the most outlandish thing possible and see if I got a kick out of it. I don’t think I thought it would actually _work_. And it does, doesn’t it? I love you, you know.”

Draco kissed him and said, “I love you too” with what he thought remarkable poise. He waited until Harry was asleep to go out to the living room and sit on the sofa to have a little panic. To think of Harry feeling he’d been dishonourable. Draco wondered if he ought to have confessed to the Operation Revenge ideas he’d had when they were getting together, but he decided to do the sensible thing and keep it to himself. So that was it, then. He truly had something of great value, however he’d stumbled into having it. All Draco had to do now was appreciate it.


End file.
